Contributions To Music
Kristine helped to pioneer the beauty and the beast vocals approach, later used by many other successful bands such as Epica, Tristania and After Forever. The term "beauty and the beast" refers to an aesthetic contrasting "angelic" female vocals with male growls or aggressive singing. Paradise Lost and The Gathering had already made use of this technique on some songs from their earlier albums but it was the Norwegian Theatre of Tragedy, Kristine's former band, that first released an entire album devoted to this approach with their self-titled debut in 1995.
A second album Velvet Darkness They Fear arrived in the following year. Theatre of Tragedy's third album Aégis in 1998 saw the band "venturing into fresh musical territory". The piano was replaced by electronic keyboards while Raymond Rohonyi opted to discard his death growls in favor of a "soft, spoken, sometimes whispering voice". The music was more clean and soft, "stripped of guitar harshness" but with a "near flawless execution" that "prompted many European critics to award Aégis perfect review scores".
For over a decade, this beauty and the beast aesthetic has flourished with many representatives across the European continent. Cradle of Filth has also been known to make use of this approach through guest female vocalists such as Liv Kristine and Sarah Jezebel Deva. A few critics have since lamented that the approach has been "done to death by countless bands" to the point that it has become something of a cliché in the genre.
Read more about this topic: Liv Kristine
Famous quotes containing the words contributions to and/or music:
“The vast material displacements the machine has made in our physical environment are perhaps in the long run less important than its spiritual contributions to our culture.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“What is our life? a play of passion;
Our mirth the music of division;
Our mothers’ wombs the tiring-houses be
Where we are dressed for this short comedy.”
—Sir Walter Raleigh (1552?–1618)